A History of Art in Three Colours, BBC Four, preview

In his new series, A History of Art in Three Colours, James Fox
explores how three hues – white, blue and gold – have shaped history.

James Fox explores how three colours have shaped historyPhoto: BBC

By James Fox

11:55AM BST 25 Jul 2012

He scanned me up and down, and laughed condescendingly. “You are in the wrong clothes, my friend.” I looked down at the dark suit I’d been asked to wear by my director, and inquired why. His response was cryptic: “Just wait: you’ll see why.” So I climbed apprehensively into the back of his pickup truck, and we set off.

It was one of the most terrifying rides of my life. The truck laboured into the mountains along near vertical paths. Its engine groaned over every bump, its tyres spun at every corner, and rocks tumbled from the sky like hail. I didn’t realise you needed nerves of steel to quarry marble.

I began to think that filming here was a terrible mistake. But then we turned a corner. In front of us was the whitest mountain I’d ever seen. And it wasn’t just any old white: this white was so bright that it was painful to look at, so powerful that it burnt my skin, and so permanent that – as I soon discovered – you can never get it out of your clothes. Our driver had evidently not been joking.

I was looking out on the world’s most famous marble quarry. We had come to Carrara, in western Italy, to film my new BBC series. A History of Art in Three Colours will bravely (and surely unsuccessfully) challenge the Olympics for viewers this July and August. In three episodes we’ll hurtle from the Bronze Age to the space age in an attempt to explore the cultural histories of three very different colours.

After much debate we decided that the three colours in question should be white, blue and gold. These colours have captured our cultural imaginations like few others, and through them I hope to prove that colour isn’t just what we choose for our walls, clothes and cars; it’s a powerful cultural force that has changed the way we think, and even altered the course of history.

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If any place proves how important colour is to us, Carrara must surely be it: generations of men have worked there since the time of Christ; together they’ve extracted almost 300 million tons of marble; and their industry is still booming 2,000 years after it started. And why? Because of colour. Because much of Carrara’s stone is a pure and immaculate white.

Yet white is nowhere near as pure as we like to think. My series will argue that white may just be the darkest colour of them all. It’s the austere colour of elitist taste; the unwelcoming colour of those exclusive London art galleries; the sterile colour of Le Corbusier’s modernist housing blocks; and the racist colour of the extremists, supremacists and fascists that litter the 20th century.

Not all colours, however, are as pernicious as white. Blue, for instance, is the world’s favourite colour. It’s been proved to lower our blood pressure, increase our creativity and improve the chances of business success. No one knows quite why, but it may be because blue ignites exotic and optimistic associations with the sunny sky, the tranquil sea and the distant horizon.

That was certainly the case for the French artist Yves Klein. As a boy he was walking along the beach at Nice with two friends. In an idle moment, the three youths decided to divide the entire world between them. One chose the earth; the other chose language; and Yves chose the blue sky above him. From that moment on he decided to devote his life to blueness.

In 1957 Klein even invented his very own blue. He called it International Klein Blue, and proceeded to put it on just about everything: paintings, objects, Parisian monuments, naked women. In fact, he was so convinced of his colour’s importance that he wrote to President Eisenhower to tell him about it. But Klein’s blue revolution never quite came off. In 1962 he suffered a fatal heart attack at the age of 34.

The third colour in my series is gold. At first it might not seem like a colour at all, but gold’s unique appearance has dictated its value for millennia. Ancient civilisations connected its yellow lustre to the power of the sun; Christians associated its reflective properties with the light of God; and almost everywhere people believed that gold’s eternal shine (for it never tarnishes) was the key to immortality. This, of course, is why Tutankhamen was buried with so much of it.

The modern equivalent of Tutankhamen’s tomb is surely the gold vault beneath the Bank of England. After more security doors than you can possibly imagine, our very excited film crew arrived at a small room that was lined with shelves of gold bullion. I was told that the gold in that one room was worth more than all the money in circulation in Britain. Every single brick-sized bar was valued at half a million pounds. If gold was once the colour of the sun, now it was, if anything, the colour of money.

So there we have it. Three colours. Three episodes. Three small adventures into the vast spectrum of our kaleidoscopic world. I hope that, if you can tear yourselves away from London 2012, you will be informed, entertained and surprised by three of our most bewitching hues. And above all, I hope that once you’ve seen the series, you won’t see colour in the same way again.

A History of Art in Three Colours starts on BBC Four on 25 July at 9.00pm